About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

Stamp Out Costly Security Defects in Software Development – Webinar to learn about real-world best practices for addressing security in development, with Robert Seacord of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and Michael White, Professional Services Engineer at Coverity
Wednesday, March 30th 2011, 2011 at 2:00 pm GMT (More …)

Just curious: Why are you including Groundwork on a blog about commercial open source software? The term “open source” only appears in their name – others are reporting that they’ve removed the term “open source” from their website (at least the front page) as well as stopped work on their “community” edition which was last updated in December of 2009.

IP lawyers as well as specialized firms are probably happy to help with the first ones, but let’s talk about the implications in the area of Value Configuration and Key activities looking at some real cases (Day Software, MySQL).

If you never got a chance to join the Open Source Think Tank, the leading invitation-only commercial open source brainstorm and networking conference, get a gist of what you can hear, below an excerpt of my notes from the 4th Open Source Think Tank.

As I recall (happy to be corrected), naming specific products in EU tenders is in violation of tender law. To wit, a tender may reference a RDBMS as requirement but not SQL Server 2008. This is why for example the Hungarians got into hot water over the Microsoft-heavy public tender a while back.

It’s probably a bit unrealistic in this day and age to think that a tender can be specific enough without referencing specific technologies and products but that’s the law today and if we’re going to advise against naming Microsoft in tenders then MySQL shouldn’t be targeted with this form of financing either.

Concentration in IT markets, especially in Europe, is basically induced by anticompetitive characteristics and legally questionable activities of three IT companies since long: IBM, Microsoft, HP.
Non-approval of upper merger will not lead to further competition. The opposite will be the case. Moreover the Open Source market,
actively promoted by Sun Microsystems, will suffer seriously.
Now this anticompetitiveness is actively supported by the EU commission’s antitrust division, headed by Mrs. Kroes. This fact is casting serious doubts in the work and competency of Mrs. Kroes’ team world-wide.
The commercial branch of MySQL has a market share of 0.4% officially and is thus far from being able to cause a concentration in the database market.
Having said this, I notify that EU commission’s decisions itself will have to be regarded as cause of concentration in case of
disapproval of above merger.

I suspect that IT concentration has different roots. Europe missed to take advantage of the “packaged” software era in the early 90’s, but few players (SAP). IT market worked and works by reselling US software plus selling system integration services.

So said, I’m with you when you state that the commission anti-trust division seems to miss the real point, and as I wrote I’d like EU to put its (our) money where its money is.

The goal of this event is to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases. (More …)

Scaling Up, Out or Virtually with MySQL – Ivan Zoratti, Sales Engineering Director for MySQL EMEA, will help you to understand which of the MySQL scaling options is best likely to meet your needs. The webinar will take place on Thursday, January 15th 2009.

WEBINAR: Scaling a PHP Application – This Zend presentation will focus on PHP software design techniques, and tools and software that help in building a high throughput. The Webinar will take place on January 28th 2009.

Reduce Your ECM Costs by 90% – This Alfresco webinar will review publicly available pricing information, and look at the cost of a typical basic system. The Webinar will take place on January 15th 2009.

Having the conference among its key themes defining business models to facilitate the use of OSS in the industry, the “Business models and strategies” session – run on the 17th of January, one day after the acquisition – was definitely the right place to ask forum speakers about the deal.

I asked the panelists an opinion about the largest open source software deal ever, and Björn Lundell, chairman of the Open Source Sweden, an industrial Swedish Open Source Association, congratulated with Mårten Mickos, expressing a positive opinion on the deal for the open source market. Basically the first round of impressions was spent to congratulate with the hero of the day. At that point I posed a specific question about the distribution channel, asking them how the merge operation could affect it.

Cédric Thomas, CEO of the OW2 Consortium, said that every small firm, open or not, at a certain point has to find its way to the market, and probably it was great time for MySQL to get sales and financial backing to better deploy its value. On the same line of thought was also Jean-Noel de Galzain, CEO of Wallix.

I was quite disappointed by the fact that none was mentioning how the Sun’s distribution channel is organized by now, and I asked the Forrester’s analyst to tell something about how Sun’s open source business model could change.

Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, said that he couldn’t anticipate Sun’s press releases on the subject, but talking about business models he stated that it’s all about making money, and a check of 1 billion it’s a lot of money!

Talking about open source business models many people and also analysts mention only specific aspects, like licensing, paying little attention on how pieces of the business fit (or not) together. The result is that the company’s strategy, or how a specific firm differentiates itself and deals with the competition, is not effectively described, neither understood.

Last week during the Sun Partner Advantage Executive Summit, organized to share with top partners Sun’s vision for growth, Jonathan Schwartz early morning on the 16th of January sent a physical letter to all partners:

Good morning! It is my extreme pleasure to start your day with some truly exciting news.

Earlier this morning, Sun made a strategic mode designed to provide myriad opportunities for partners and the market at large. We announced our intention to acquire MySQL AB, one of the world’s fastest-growing and most popular databases. [..]

Sun and its partners soon will enjoy unprecedented access to a massive new set of customers. In short, the MySQL database is deployed across every major operating system, hardware platform, geography, industry and application type, and we are committed to working with you to help it gain even greater relevance in the marketplace.

What’s more, we think our operational, sales and financial backing, along with our global services strength, will enhance MySQL’s value proposition to customers by giving them peace of mind to deploy it at scale enterprise — on whichever platforms they so choose.

Anil Gadre later discussed the news with partners, and I would have liked to attend to. While it is pretty clear that Sun is consolidating its position as the largest open source contributor, it is still unclear how Sun’s partners will eventually take advantage of a new set of customers in the database arena. Looking at how MySQL is doing business now, and who and how add value to the ‘M’ in LAMP all over the world, I see many unanswered questions on the table.

Open Source Franchising or not, Sun has to work a lot with its channel to make this move worth well more than the price paid.

There is a strong difference in selling approach between Sun and MySQL. While Sun traditionally leverages its hardware business to provide complete service packages (hw+sw+support), MySQL traditionally leverages its strong developers community to monetize mission critical deployments from the bottom. I suspect that Sun may have bought MySQL mainly to prevent competitors reaching it first (and potentially killing it in the process); this way the advantage of a lower price per database deployed can continue to be converted into preserved hardware margins. The idea that MySQL can be converted into a “grid database” in a way similar to Amazon’s SimpleDB is not convincing, and may make sense only if Sun intend to relaunch its grid initiative (at lower prices) offering the supported MySQL, OpenSolaris and apache in preconfigured means.

I agree with you Carlo, there is a huge difference between the two distribution channels. Sun’s channel today is delivering products plus standardized support services, while MySQL’s ecosystem deploy web applications tailored on specific users’ needs. As a result I see little chance for cross-selling opportunities, consider that MySQL runs on a lot of platform, as also Jonathan Schwartz highlighted.

About the grid-database it could possibly happen and make sense, but it is not going to help partners anyway.